Abstract

This article concerns the question of whether St. Thomas Aquinas can be considered a young Earth creationist. This question breaks down to three different though interrelated issues: Aquinas’s view on the origin of species, his position on the length of the six days of creation (whether they were natural days or other periods of time) and his views on the age of the earth. Each of the topics is addressed separately in the subsequent sections. The article attempts to establish Thomas’s views by his explicit statements as well as what he implies in some fragments. The conclusion presents Aquinas as a creationist with an open-ended view of the timescale of the creative events and the age of the universe.